Project Management Best Practices

Project management best practices, followed closely, can help ensure the success of a project. These core routines foster development and minimize risks. TrackerSuite.Net offers applications that facilitate these routines.

Organizations are increasingly looking towards technology to improve the processes that drive business, perhaps no more so than in the area of project management, in which companies seek solutions to improve project success rates, lower costs and increase efficiencies.

These solutions usually focus aspects of project management best practices, processes that are recognized as helping to ensure the success of a project, if followed. These core practices include Communication, Workflow, Visibility, Reporting and Measurement.

Many of these solutions focus on only few of these practices. TrackerSuite.Net offers organizations the opportunity to facilitate all the best practices of project management.

Communication

Communication ensures that all team members and managers are on the same page about the project, its progress, status, work and responsibilities, issues and risks. Poor communication leads to delays, allows project issues to grow in potential magnitude unchecked, create additional work, and often result in deliverables of poor quality. Good communication minimizes the possibility of these issues, as well as helping project teams become more responsive and adaptive to changes in schedule and scope.

TrackerSuite.Net also automates communication via email. It sends automated email notifications of task assignments and schedule changes, automated reminders for late status reports and timesheets, and can be configured to send project e-newsletters to teams, keeping everyone on the same page regarding the project’s objectives, milestones, tasks, key dates, status, its issues and risks.

Workflow

Proper workflow ensures that teams have ready access to the tools and information they need to work effectively, and that process are in place that allows work to proceed in an orderly manner.

As well as serving as a virtual office portal, TrackerSuite.Net provides a single, central location for project teams to work on their projects, inside the same tool they use to communicate with every day – their email clients. From a project workspace, they can configure themselves via widgets, users are a click away from every piece of project information: objectives, goals, milestones, tasks, key dates, status reports and more.

Users can also access project documents and files, using functions for check-in/check-out and versioning.

Visibility

As projects grow in size and complexity, the visibility within them diminishes, forcing executives and managers to dig through spreadsheets, reports and other documents to find the information they need, and limiting the understanding of team members of how their work contributes to the project as whole, as well as the progress of other tasks.

TrackerSuite.Net allows projects to be executed within a totally electronic environment. Executives and managers can leverage dashboards for global overviews of their projects and resource availability analysis, from which they can quickly drill down to the information they are looking for.

For team members that want to see where they fit in the project, and other locations where they might be able to offer their skills, a Work Breakdown Structure provides a graphic view of the work that a project is composed of, where their work fits within the project and the schedule of other tasks that are linked or dependent on it.

Reporting

For many projects, developing comprehensive business intelligence from the mass of spreadsheets and status reports in a timely fashion can be challenging, with the difficulty rising in tandem with the size of the project and resources assigned to it. However, the lack of a strong reporting system leads to uninformed, unsupported decisions that can lead to cost overruns and project delays.

The integrated nature of TrackerSuite.Net applications eliminates this difficulty. Instead of compiling data from several disparate systems into meaningful business intelligence, managers and executives can access a portal where they may configure and generate real-time reports on the status, progress, costs and forecasts of their projects. Using these reports, managers and executives can make informed, effective decisions.

Measurement

Beyond the reporting of a project’s status, progress and costs, organizations that are able to measure the value of their projects against the work invested and planned for them can foster a healthier project portfolio.

Within TrackerSuite.Net, organizations can easily review the Earned Value of their projects, including their adherence to budget and schedule, as well as forecasts of their work remaining and final costs. Using these reports, organizations can easily identify valuable projects that need greater support, as well as projects where the benefits need to be reconsidered against mounting costs.

For More Information

To learn more about TrackerSuite.Net and how it can help facilitate your best practices for project management, please contact Automation Centre today at (520) 882-9287, or email Info@Acentre.com.

Automation Centre is also pleased to offer a free demo of TrackerSuite.Net, which includes its applications for project management, time and expense reporting, purchasing, payment requests, personnel management, support services and more. Interested parties may register for immediate access to an evaluation site to make a hands-on evaluation of TrackerSuite.Net for their needs.